Even Neon Love Fades

Dial tones and Boy George inspired vocals have their place in the world, and that place is on Cut Copy's 2004 album "Bright Like Neon Love." My feelings on this album are less bright like neon and more powder blue like the sheets in your first apartment, where you waited for phone calls that never came. I get it, Dan Whitford, you and your girl had something, and you're convinced you might never have it with anyone else, but even so - 12 songs abotu it seems to be boardering on over kill.

But lets start with the good stuff. The album kicks off with easily it's best song, "Time Stands Still", which is four and half minutes of simple yet rich tones laced with dreamy vocals. I like to imagine vocalist Dan Whitford strung out on tissues and day time television, dragged by his goodwilled crew neck ("Canton Little Leauge, 1998") to a Austin club for a show, rocking back and forth on his heels, simultaneously pushing his bangs out of his eyes and pressing the keys of his cassio. Mostly I like to imagine this because someday I, and every girl who's ever broken your heart, wants to have the dreamy album written in her wake. Back to the music: electropop at it's simplest, four notes reconfigured, enough rhythm for an Australian discotech, with a healthy dose of fade synths.

The album goes south with the fourth song "Saturday [reprise]" which is where it first becomes evident that this album was not made only for some girl in leather boots and work shirt dresses, but to feed the ego of the boy who lost her. A minute and a half reprise for a song only two minutes longer, instead of one five minute song is just silly, especially when you consider that the song is really only twenty seconds looped and the reprise is virtually identically to the original. Even sillier though, is "DD-5" a 26 second transition between songs.

I use the word "silly" because these things aren't necessarily bad, they just are purposeful goofs on the bands part. When you keep in mind that Cut Copy didn't set out to remake Marvin Gaye's "Here, My Dear" and you take "Bright Like Neon Love" for what it is- a menagerie of post-punk keyboard riffs - it's not bad. Not bad at all. Let it play through and it walks you down memory lane and leaves you with a sort of refreshed feeling and the slightest desire to maybe fall in love. That is, if you remember that even neon love will be bleached out by all your morning time park dates and flashbulb photographs.

Song to come soon!